Wha-a-a? A Mere 87 Tons of Ticker Tape?

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Published: June 12, 1991

It was billed as "the mother of all parades." And the organizers had promised that 12 million pounds of confetti, a million yellow ribbons and 6,000 tons of ticker tape would be dropped on the veterans returning from the Persian Gulf war -- more than in any other parade in the city's history.

But after more than 400 parks and sanitation workers had worked throughout the night and all yesterday morning sweeping up the debris in the Canyon of Heroes on lower Broadway, sanitation officials said they had collected but 87 tons of ticker tape. That would be a fraction of the 1,262 tons reportedly dropped on the hostages returning from Iran in 1981 or the 648 tons said to have rained down on the World Champion Mets in 1986.

Indeed, 87 tons doesn't begin to rank in the top 10 list of ticker-tape tonnage. It hardly deserves an honorable mention in the top 20. Crowd Estimate a Puzzle, Too

This was most disappointing to parade fans, who were already trying to solve the puzzle of how the Police Department had come up with a crowd estimate of 4.7 million, implying that more people than live in Leningrad were squeezed into the 16-block route. The department stood by its estimate yesterday. Never mind, other officials said, the ticker-tape tonnage would prove it was the biggest parade.

But guess again. Even though sanitation workers who remembered past parades said the trail of paper three feet deep along the route rivaled that of the Mets victory celebration, in the end the count was still 87 tons.

"It's a puzzling disparity," said a spokeswoman for the Sanitation Department, Barbara Orlando. "And we've been trying to find some answers today. Starting a lot earlier in parade history, there were a lot of estimates. We got into a realm of tonnage and tonnage expectation that was beyond what was real."

Does that mean the mother of all parades was in reality the pygmy of all parades? Not at all, Ms. Orlando said. It means simply that in the past the Sanitation Department may have overestimated the amount of paper that swirled down on heroes. "Now we may have to revise these numbers," she said.

In past parades, sanitation officials -- pressed by scores of reporters hungry for statistics -- often estimated the tonnage of paper by counting the number of trucks and multiplying by how much each truck held, Ms. Orlando said. But many trucks were only half full, she conceded.

In addition some loads of ticker tape in the past were counted twice, sanitation officials said, once when they were swept up by street sweepers and again when they were picked up by garbage trucks. Adding to the disparity, officials used to count the paper collected by private carters and by the Parks Department, which they no longer do.

This time, Ms. Orlando said, the department weighed the trucks before they went to the landfill. The huge disparity between this parade's tonnage and the hyperbolic estimates of the past led officials to coin the expressions "tickertons" and "actual tons." A tickerton, apparently, is an enormously inflated figure based on rough estimates not immune to political pressures. 'Truth in Ticker Tape'

"We actually weighed it," the Commissioner of Sanitation, Steven M. Polan, said last night. "It seems that in the past the weights were based on estimates. This reflects our policy of truth in ticker tape."

Mr. Polan said that by all accounts from sanitation workers, "this parade actually exceeded past parades" in the amount of paper debris and the length of the route. Much of the debris was confetti, which is lightweight, he said, and sanitation workers did not have to wet down the paper as in the past to keep it from blowing away.

Both factors may have kept the weight lower than in the past, Mr. Polan said, but not enought to account for the huge disparity between this parade and the estimate in 1981, for instance, of 1,262 tons at the hostage parade.

While stopping short of saying that former city officials had lied about the amount of ticker tape, Mr. Polan said, "Perhaps their estimates were influenced by their enthusiasm."

"This is no tickergate," he added.

Photos: Sanitation workers collected 87 tons of ticker tape after Monday's parade. Bruce Stepanek used a cherry picker to clear trees in City Hall Park of tissue paper. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. B1); Sanitation workers using a front-loader yesterday to pick up mounds of paper that lined the route of march along Broadway after the parade honoring troops from the Persian Gulf war. (Associated Press)(pg. B2)